April 2013

March 15, 2008

European Commission Double Standards

Google has recently managed to seal their bid to buy DoubleClick, which now makes it the largest provider of online advertising by quite some way. There was a bidding war over DoubleClick between (you guessed it) Microsoft and Google. My question though is how could the European Commission possibly allow the largest competitor to Google in terms of online advertising to be bought over by them, while Microsoft keeps getting nailed with Anti-Trust law suits due to alleged anti-competitive behaviour?

The same or similar could be said about Verisign's acquisitions of both Thawte and Geotrust, their major competitors. Are there a different set of rules and regulations that apply to Microsoft that don't seem to apply to everyone else?